Studying influence and accounting use—Empirical evidence about individual managers and organizations with changes in Galician healthcare

Legislation outlined proposed changes in Galician Health Centres. This allowed us to set down the theory about personal and organizational Information–Influence Matrices and then Frameworks of Issues for the interactions between an individual Financial Manager and a Health Centre Co-ordinator, as well as the proposed organizational changes into a new system [Purdy DE, Gago S. Extending influence and accounting use: developing the frameworks to incorporate Galician legal matters about the proposed healthcare changes with managers and organizations for empirical study. Critical Perspectives on Accounting; in press].Evidence from a longitudinal study covering January 1997 and December 2001, indicated the suitability of these types of Matrices and Frameworks of Issues to analyse conversational data.Results agreed with anticipations at a personal level—wholly for a co-ordinator and partly for the Financial Manager. Differences between the findings and our anticipated Financial Manager's framework are straightforward and we have amended our Framework accordingly. The organization level has followed our anticipations though only 15% of Health Centres had continued with the new system, 85% remained working with the old system.Galician law contained aspirations for changing healthcare with autonomous Health Centres. Spanish health policies and budget laws have inhibited moves to change, as well as the actions of the professionals involved.     

The “value” effect and the market for Chinese stocks

A long literature in empirical finance has isolated both a “value” and a small-capitalization effect in asset pricing. This study confirms the existence of these “style” effects both in new types of equity indexes and in the stocks of Chinese companies traded in international markets. We then present a new nonparametric method of portfolio construction that enables investors to extract the predictive power of these style effects, without diluting their efficacy through an unintended weighting distribution that closely resembles capitalization weighting. We then develop a simple method to isolate periods where style tilts are likely to be particularly effective.     

Work incentives and other effects of the transition to social assistance in the transition economies: Evidence from Bulgaria

The compensation levels, duration structure and means-tested aspects of the income support system for the unemployed in Bulgaria are considered. The available evidence points to the emergence of long term unemployment as a major problem, to a system of social assistance (SA) which is not overly generous and to growing poverty. Nevertheless, econometric analysis using micro data indicates that disincentives for job search exist for SA recipients. In the context of an acute fiscal crisis, systemic efficiency might be improved by restricting access to some benefits, by some changes in scaling, in moves towards targeted contributions and in improvements in administrative capacity.     

Planning knowledge for phased rollout projects

This paper explores how projects that can be considered as repeatable and replicable in a sequence of deliverables over a period of time can be planned and executed (rolled out) in a way that maximizes knowledge transfer and production from one execution to the next. A variety of management disciplines were reviewed to understand the way that project and program rollouts are treated in IT, product development, organizational learning, and manufacturing literature. These reviews enabled the development of a conceptual model to describe how planning and implementing the rollout of a product or service can be more knowledge‐focused and an accompanying capability maturity model. Several examples from real life, including one experienced by one of the authors, were used to illustrate and test the conceptual model. The model integrates knowledge management, change control, and planning in a way that can develop organizational learning and the authors assert that this can improve productivity and both tangible and intangible returns to those that follow the model. An accompanying capability maturity model is also presented. The conceptual model, while initially tested against several real‐life cases, needs to be tested against a new set of projects as an action learning research project in order to more fully develop knowledge of the dynamics of learning and improvement in rollout projects. The implication is that when project managers undervalue important learning aspects of phased rollouts, they may miss important organizational learning opportunities.     

From engineer to taxi driver? Language proficiency and the occupational skills of immigrants

We examine the ability of immigrants to transfer the occupational human capital they acquired prior to immigration. We first augment a model of occupational choice to study the implications of language proficiency on the cross‐border transferability of occupational human capital. We then explore the empirical predictions using information about the skill requirements from O^*NET and a unique dataset that includes both the last source country occupation and the first four years of occupations in Canada. We supplement the analysis using Census estimates for the same cohort with source country occupational skill requirements predicted using detailed human capital related information such as field of study. We find that male immigrants to Canada were employed in source country occupations that typically require high levels of cognitive skills, but rely less intently on manual skills. Following immigration, they find initial employment in occupations that require the opposite. Consistent with the hypothesized asymmetric role of language in the transferability of previously acquired cognitive and manual skills, these discrepancies are larger among immigrants with limited language fluency.     

Group bargaining in supply chains

Review of Economic Design - We consider a vertical supply chain in which a monopoly retailer produces a good by assembling a number of essential components each of which is owned by a monopoly....     

Transport policy in Australia—Evolution,learning and policy transfer

Urban transport policy in Australia has changed markedly over the period since the first generation of modern urban transport strategies were published in the 1960s. This is illustrated through a review of 43 transport strategies published for the five largest cities (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide) in Australia between 1965 and 2010. The review is complemented with observations from a survey of public servants in the policy and strategy divisions of state and territory transport agencies. The results of this research are examined using the Dolowitz–Marsh framework, considering the need to seek policy transfer, who is involved, what is transferred, from where policy lessons are learnt, the degree of transfer, constraints to policy learning and demonstration that transfer has occurred. The evidence for policy transfer and learning is mixed. Transport policy adopted by the states of Australia for their respective capital cities has been remarkably similar between the cities and has changed in a similar way over time, indicating the almost seamless transfer of concepts. Less positively, there is little published evidence that the performance of previous strategies has been critically examined and lessons learned, and that the approaches adopted in strategies are superior to alternative approaches and are able to achieve the objectives set for them.     

A guide map to the terrain of gift value

This article integrates a broad range of gift‐giving literature into a conceptual framework that puts the all too often overlooked construct of personal value at its core. Although there have been substantial contributions from the fields of anthropology, sociology, economics, and consumer behavior, efforts to model gift giving have failed to put the value of the gift‐giving experience at the center of the exchange. Within this article, a model of the gift‐giving experience that overcomes this critical shortcoming is proposed. The model establishes clear categories for breaking the giving process into easily examinable elements, and it is argued that although the concept of value is not a simple one, it should be central to any examination of the gift‐giving phenomenon. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.